Hydrometallurgical recycling of lithium-ion batteries by reductive leaching with sodium metabisulphite

Abstract

The hydrometallurgical extraction of metals from spent lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) was investigated. LIBs were first dismantled and a fraction rich in the active material was obtained by physical separation, containing 95% of the initial electrode, 2% of the initial steel and 22% of plastic materials. Several reducers were tested to improve metals dissolution in the leaching step using sulphuric acid. Sodium metabisulphite led to the best results and was studied in more detail. The best concentration of NaSO was 0.1 M. The metals dissolution increased with acid concentration, however, concentrations higher than 1.25 M are unnecessary. Best results were reached using a stirring speed of 400 min. The metals leaching efficiency from the active material (Li, Mn, Ni, Co) increased with the temperature and was above 80% for temperatures higher than 60 °C. The dissolution of metals also rose with the increase in the liquid/solid ratio (L/S), however, extractions above 85% can be reached at L/S as lower as 4.5 L/kg, which is favourable for further purification and recovery operations. About 90% of metals extraction can be achieved after only 0.5 h of leaching. Sodium metabisulphite can be an alternative reducer to increase the leaching of Li, Mn, Co, and Ni from spent LIBs.

Selective reductive leaching of cobalt and lithium from industrially crushed waste Li-ion batteries in sulfuric acid system

“…Recently, a great deal of research has been devoted to the leaching process of waste Li-ion battery scraps with different types of mineral acids like HCl (Guo et al, 2016), H3PO4 (Chen et al, 2017), H2SO4 (Pagnanelli et al, 2016) and organic acids including citric acid (Zheng et al, 2016), malic acid (Li et al, 2010) and lactic acid (Li et al, 2017). Moreover, the leaching efficiency of cobalt and lithium has also been shown to increase with the use of additional reducing agents like H2O2 (Pagnanelli et al, 2017b), Na2S2O5 (Vieceli et al, 2018), NaHSO3 (Meshram et al, 2016), D-glucose (Granata et al, 2012) as well as ascorbic acid (Li et al, 2012). (Meshram et al, 2016) 35.8 a 1 M H2SO4 + 5% (v/v) H2O2 50 14.1 3.1 79 94 - (Meshram et al, 2016) 44.2 a 4 M H2SO4 + 10% (v/v) H2O2 100 42.0 5.3 95 96 - (Chen et al, 2011) 54.0 a 2 M H2SO4 + 5% (v/v) H2O2 50 26.7 3.2 99 99 - (Sun and Qiu, 2011a) 35.8 a 1 M H2SO4 + 7.5 M NaHSO3 50 15.2 3.0 85 93 - (Meshram et al, 2016) 35.4 a 3 M H2SO4 + 0.25 M Na2S2O3 66 23.1 2.4 99 99 50 (Wang et al, 2012) 41.5 a 0.34 M H3PO4 + 2% (v/v) H2O2 8 3.2 0.4 95 95 - (Pinna et al, 2017) 54.0 a 0.1 M Citric + 0.02 M ascorbic 2 0.9 0.1 80 100 - (Nayaka et al, 2015) 54.0 a 0.5 M glycine + 0.02 M ascorbic 2 1.0 0.1 95 95 - (Nayaka et al, 2016a) 55.0 a 1.25 M ascorbic acid 25 13.1 1.6 95 99 - (Li et al, 2012) -2 M H2SO4 + 4% H2O2 66 32.7 2.3 97 97 65 (Nayl et al, 2017) 52.0 a 1 M H2SO4 + 0.02 M glucose 35 16.0 1.5 88 92…”

Progress and Status of Hydrometallurgical and Direct Recycling of Li-Ion Batteries and Beyond

“…Apart from the references cited above, other research groups worked on various optimization of the sulfuric acid process by changing process parameters such as adding sonication to the leaching step [132,133], or replacing the reducing agent [134][135][136]. Other publications are summarized in Table S1 in Supplementary Information [137][138][139][140][141][142][143][144].…”

Recent advances on hydrometallurgical recovery of critical and precious elements from end of life electronic wastes - a review

“…However, precautions and safety measurements should be taken prior dismantling the spent Li-batteries. Even the spent LiBs contain residual voltage and can produce strong heat and flames due to self-ignition (because of residual charge) and internal short circuit (Nan, Han, & Zuo, 2005;Vieceli et al, 2018). Therefore, precautionary steps like (i) refrigeration using NaCl or water, (ii) cryogenic activities like immersion in liquid nitrogen for 4-6 min and (iii) promoting short circuit and discharging the batteries using electric iron powder were proposed in the literature (Li, Wang, & Xu, 2016;Vieceli et al, 2018).…”